A Writer True to His Calling
I walked gingerly through a barren
no-man’s
land of the great writer’s
dismay as I read MORE
MATTER (Essays and
Criticism), by America’s
distinguished man of letters, his
journey through
memories of his own published
works, ideas
that he nurtured with loving
care that he saw
fading into the sink hole of
lost time, wondering,
in his usual elegant prose, was
it worth the effort?
But he also said to Jeffery
Brown in his PBS
interview, “There is a kind of
spiritual health
in trying to express reality.
When you feel you’ve
captured it, if only in a
phrase or correct adjective,
there is something very happy-making
about it.”
The great American man of
letters wrote stories
“to give the mundane its
beautiful due,” and
dismayed or not, sink hole or
no sink hole, he
wrote because he never tired
of “creation’s giddy
joy,” and he did not die like
another great American
writer so depressed and
paranoid that he blew his
brains out with his favorite shotgun,
but with
the grace and dignity of a writer
true to his calling
to the ENDPOINT (and Other
Poems) of his
satisfying well-lived 76-year-old
life.
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